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Will Amazon Put Advertisements In eBooks?
destinyland writes "A book editor at Houghton Mifflin argues ebook advertising is 'coming soon to a book near you.' (Paywalled unless you go through Google.) Amazon has filed a patent for advertisements on the Kindle, and the book editor joins with a business professor in the Wall Street Journal to make the case for advertisements in ebooks. Book sales haven't increased over the last decade, and profits are being squeezed even lower by ebooks. According to another industry analyst, Amazon is being pressured to make ebook sales more profitable for publishers, partly because Apple offers them more lucrative terms in Apple's iBookstore. One technology blog notes that Amazon's preference seems to be keeping book prices low, and wonders whether consumers would accept advertising if it meant that new ebooks were then free. Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren has confused the issue even more by publishing a 'shoppable' children's storybook online, prompting a fierce reaction from one blog: 'I hope it's the last. Books are one of the last refuges in our world from the constant cry by advertisers to spend money and fill our lives with unnecessary things.'"
None. AnyDVD takes care of that for me.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
As it happens, few would attribute to me an ideology of environmentalism, but I do wonder about how many penis enlargement products I really need to pursue happiness. Yah, the semantics here are not quite on point, but an argument against pointless excess is sort of the "ism" some are using to be anti-advertising. As a practical matter, they probably package this rather obvious principle in some sort of nutty ism. Anyway, given the general cultural level, even principles end up indistinguishable from ideology.
Now as it happens commercial speech has significant local ,legal protections. Different kinds of speech have different protection rules, but there is not a big fundamental difference between commercial speech and political speech. So one way to look at this issue is that people are complaining about a corporate "person" exercising their constitutional rights. This is a common argument form. For instance, I notice some Islamic types are exercising some constitutional rights around building a mosque in NYC and there is quite a political firestorm.
As far as commercial speech is concerned, there is actually may not be a big constitutional issue involved in effectively suppressing it, IMO.
Corporate personhood
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The corporate personhood debate refers to the controversy (primarily in the United States) over the question of what subset of rights afforded under the law to natural persons should also be afforded to corporations as legal persons.
In the United States, corporations were recognized as having rights to contract, and to have those contracts honored the same as contracts entered into by natural persons, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, decided in 1819. In the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394, the Supreme Court recognized that corporations were recognized as persons for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment.[1][2] Some critics of corporate personhood, however, most notably author Thom Hartmann in his book "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," claim that this was an intentional misinterpretation of the case inserted into the Court record by reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis.[3] Bancroft Davis had previously served as president of Newburgh and New York Railway Co.
Proponents of corporate personhood believe that corporations, as associations of shareholders, were intended by the founders and framers to enjoy many, if not all, of the same rights as would the shareholders acting individually, such as the right to lobby the government, the right to due process and compensation before being deprived of property, and the right, as legal entities, to speak freely. All of these rights have been upheld by the U.S. courts.
etc.
The way I look at it, SCOTUS gets its cover on this from not even from Congressional statutes, but from "intent".
Ah well. This sort of issue is not going to immediately generate an estchaton, so who should actually have it on the top of their priority list? It is fun, but life is short. In the meantime, having both option A and B available would look pretty good.